The number of books on the Kurds and Kurdistan has proliferated over the last 15 years. Despite the breadth of scholarly output, practices of knowledge production in Kurdish Studies have been hardly theorized at all. The questions of how scholars approach their field of inquiry and ultimately how their categorizations and representations impact the lives and politics of the people, political parties and social movements they investigate, are the focus of the special issue we propose.

Critical reflections on methodology, ontology and epistemology, i.e. questions of how scholars approach their field of inquiry, how previously held world views, values, ideologies, concepts of the social and the political interfere with the positivist claims to scientific objectivity, and ultimately how their categorizations and representations impact the lives and politics of the subjects of their analyses, are scant and isolated.

The aim of this special volume is to address this arrant gap in the literature by providing a unique and novel take on the field that puts the question of knowledge production in representations of the Kurds center stage. We seek original and thought provoking contributions that problematize essentialisms in scholarship, literature, and popular/social media. We are looking for contributions that addresses problematiques, such as the role of the scholar as protagonist of the social world, the practices and politics of knowledge production, scientific objectivism versus subjectivism, the structure versus agency debate, constructions of Self and Other, the categorization of people into ethnic groups and nations, gender norms and patterns of objectification, the territorialization of culture, the nature of the sovereign state, etc.. While intended to prominently address such core questions of methodology, ontology and epistemology, equal attention will be given to the analysis of the potential impact these discourses may have on the subjects of the respective representations, i.e. the people, societies and political movements in Kurdistan and among the Kurdish diaspora. This impact for example is acutely tangible with the so called research-policy nexus, i.e. the significance of academia in the process of policy formulation and implementation, where for Iraqi Kurdistan Černy has argued that the impact of scholarly essentialist representations of the Kurds is critical in the construction of the post-Saddam political order of Iraq and/or the debate about the (future) political status of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.[1]

Interdisciplinary by nature, the format of this special issue is intended to provide leading scholars in Kurdish Studies with a unique forum to critically reflect on their own positionality, the epistemologies of their work, but also to furnish new voices with the opportunity to challenge established notions in the field with the explicit invitation to act as iconoclasts in order to provoke prolific and far-reaching discussions of the field and its shortcomings well beyond this special issue to the benefit of the scholarly community at large.

Deadline for submission of abstracts: 23 March 2018. Please send 300 word abstracts (including tentative title and author’s institutional affiliation) to Hannes Černy and Joost Jongerden at CernyH@ceu.edu and joost.jongerden@wur.nl.

We are currently in discussion with a couple of journals ranked among the top ten on ethnicity and nationalism that will be concluded in early April. By the end of April 2018 prospective authors will be informed of their acceptance and what journal the special issue will appear in.

Length of articles: 6,000 – 8,000 words (including references)

Tentative submission date of solid first drafts to the editors: summer 2019